Report: CCPD needs goals, vision, complete reorganization

Illinois-based Etico Solutions, a police analysis firm specializing in studying police manpower, spent more than a year analyzing the department and found an array of organizational problems for the next police chief to ponder.

The report will be presented to City Council during its meeting Tuesday.

The changes it recommends will be postponed until at least October, when the city expects to hire a new police chief, City Manager Angel Escobar said.

“(The report) is going to be a very good tool,” Escobar said. “We’ll leave it up to the new chief and see what he wants to implement.”

The full report hasn’t been released, but an executive summary given to the City Council said the department was haphazardly organized without clear goals. In one case, the consultants found a list of four goals that had been set recently, but most supervisors weren’t even aware the goals existed.

The city has been adding more officers to the department, but because the department is disorganized, the new officers add to the confusion instead of helping the problem, the report said.

“The team was convinced that a complete reorganization was needed,” the report says.

The report criticizes the department’s use of multiple, small speciality units that address specific areas of crime. The units may have successfully solved problems, but weren’t made consistently with the same goals, the report says.

“The result of such gradual and localized changes is an agency that appears to be pulling itself in multiple directions simultaneously without an orchestrated strategic charge,” it says.

Some patrol officers in the directed patrol division are given ample time to actively address problems, but other beat officers spend most of their time responding to calls and writing reports, with little time left to be proactive, the report says.

The report also said:

-- Officers report to certain supervisors instead of others based on personality conflicts or without reason.

-- Police dispatchers are understaffed, with mandatory overtime and high turnover.

-- Officers should switch from four 10-hour shifts a week to a 12-hour shift schedule.

The $90,000 study was the first analysis of the department’s manpower since 1998.